The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide (1996) – Douglas Adams

I’m again resuming my Wednesday literature segment, which features an excerpt from Douglas Adams’s The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – specifically from Book Two in the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). If you enjoy dabbling in books, feel free to join me on Goodreads [here]. My last extracts were The Gioconda Smile (1922) by Aldous Huxley and The Force of Circumstance (1924) by W. Somerset Maugham.

Following the sound advice of my friend Ashley at Gentle Chapter (an avid reader, I might add), instead of paying for new books – some of which turn out to be duds – I joined my local library here in Bogotá, Colombia: the Julio Mario Santo Domingo (image left). It houses an impressive collection of English literature, which I’ve decided to read alphabetically by the authors’ surnames, arranged left to right along the shelves. This venture, like my Music Library Project (started on July 19th, 2019), will take years – perhaps decades – but I’ll share here my favourite passages as I go, beginning with the first book to appear: the time-honoured, humorous science-fiction saga, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

So here are the five novels from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker series. Book One – the most celebrated – opens just before Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent is rescued by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Guide, and together they hitch rides through time and space. I’m currently on Book Two, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where our ragtag heroes are facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers – though somehow it’s also the perfect time for a nice cup of tea. It’s all wonderfully trippy yet surprisingly relatable. Adams’s genius lies in how he makes the most far-flung absurdities – the bureaucratic nightmares, neurotic machines, and misplaced egos scattered across the cosmos – mirror our own everyday follies here on Earth.

To set the scene for the excerpt below, from Chapter 6:
Zaphod Beeblebrox – ex-President of the Galaxy and full-time egomaniac – is reunited with Marvin the Paranoid Android at Megadodo Publications, the headquarters of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “the most totally remarkable book in the whole of the known Universe.” Together they approach a bank of elevators, whose job isn’t merely to move up and down but to anticipate passengers’ needs – and, more often than not, argue about them. Their grand cosmic adventure is stalled, hilariously, by the neuroses of sentient machinery. So without further ado, I present today’s featured excerpt from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

“So, how are you?” he said aloud.
“Oh, fine,” said Marvin, “if you happen to like being me which personally I don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Zaphod as the elevator doors opened.
“Hello,” said the elevator sweetly, “I am to be your elevator for this trip to the floor of your choice. I have been designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation to take you, the visitor to the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, into these their offices. If you enjoy your ride, which will be swift and pleasurable, then you may care to experience some of the other elevators which have recently been installed in the offices of the Galactic tax department, Boobiloo Baby Foods and the Sirian State Mental Hospital, where many ex-Sirius Cybernetics Corporation executives will be delighted to welcome your visits, sympathy, and happy tales of the outside world.”
“Yeah,” said Zaphod, stepping into it, “what else do you do besides talk?”
“I go up,” said the elevator, “or down.”
“Good,” said Zaphod, “We’re going up.”
“Or down,” the elevator reminded him.
“Yeah, OK, up please.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Down’s very nice,” suggested the elevator hopefully.
“Oh yeah?”
“Super.”
“Good,” said Zaphod, “Now will you take us up?”
“May I ask you,” inquired the elevator in its sweetest, most reasonable voice, “if you’ve considered all the possibilities that down might offer you?”
Zaphod knocked one of his heads against the inside wall. He didn’t need this, he thought to himself, this of all things he had no need of. He hadn’t asked to be here. If he was asked at this moment where he would like to be he would probably have said he would like to be lying on the beach with at least fifty beautiful women and a small team of experts working out new ways they could be nice to him, which was his usual reply. To this he would probably have added something passionate on the subject of food.
One thing he didn’t want to be doing was chasing after the man who ruled the Universe, who was only doing a job which he might as well keep at, because if it wasn’t him it would only be someone else. Most of all he didn’t want to be standing in an office block arguing with an elevator.
“Like what other possibilities?” he asked wearily.
“Well,” the voice trickled on like honey on biscuits, “there’s the basement, the microfiles, the heating system … er …”
It paused.
“Nothing particularly exciting,” it admitted, “but they are alternatives.”
“Holy Zarquon,” muttered Zaphod, “did I ask for an existentialist elevator?” he beat his fists against the wall.
“What’s the matter with the thing?” he spat.
“It doesn’t want to go up,” said Marvin simply, “I think it’s afraid.
“Afraid?” cried Zaphod, “Of what? Heights? An elevator that’s afraid of heights?”
“No,” said the elevator miserably, “of the future …”
“The future?” exclaimed Zaphod, “What does the wretched thing want, a pension scheme?”
At that moment a commotion broke out in the reception hall behind them. From the walls around them came the sound of suddenly active machinery.
“We can all see into the future,” whispered the elevator in what sounded like terror, “it’s part of our programming.”
Zaphod looked out of the elevator – an agitated crowd had gathered round the elevator area, pointing and shouting.
Every elevator in the building was coming down, very fast.
He ducked back in.
“Marvin,” he said, “just get this elevator go up will you? We’ve got to get to Zarniwoop.”
“Why?” asked Marvin dolefully.
“I don’t know,” said Zaphod, “but when I find him, he’d better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him.”
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons“ jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the curios principle of “defocused temporal perception”. In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whist waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counsellor for neurotic elevators.
At the fifteenth floor the elevator doors opened quickly.
“Fifteenth,” said the elevator, “and remember, I’m only doing this because I like your robot.”
Zaphod and Marvin bundled out of the elevator which instantly snapped its doors shut and dropped as fast as its mechanism would take it.

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand